Secret Superhero
by RayWritesThings
Summary: When Oliver and Laurel are unknowingly assigned each other in a joint Team Arrow/Team Flash holiday gift exchange, feelings long-held secret rise to the surface. / AU No "Eleven-Fifty-Nine", set between season 6/season 4 crossover event and midseason finales.


**Happy holidays to you all! I wrote this little thing in the span of a few hours, so hopefully you all find it an enjoyable addition to your individual festivities. This is set in an AU timeline where Laurel was never stabbed, Felicity remained off the team and Oliver never learned Laurel still had feelings for him. I think any other small changes should make themselves known within the story itself, but don't worry too much about the season plots or anything. It's just meant to be a bit of holiday fun. Thanks to Okori once again for beta-reading, and wishing you all a Happy Holidays and New Year!**

**-RayWritesThings**

**Secret Superhero**

Like most years, the holiday season caught Laurel unaware. She'd spent so many years ignoring it that it was something of a habit now. It didn't help that between her busy schedule and the majority of her friends and family having gone without it, too, she had little reason to bother remembering it. It was always something that occurred to her as she walked down streets lined with lights and wreaths in store windows, and even then it was more of an afterthought.

Except this year, when something entirely unexpected happened.

Their meeting in the base that evening before heading out was interrupted when a streak of lightning entered the room, announcing Barry's presence. "Hey, guys!"

He wasn't alone, as he set down the brand-new Mrs. West-Allen. Iris was beaming from ear to ear and wearing a Santa hat. "Sorry if we're interrupting."

"That's okay," Oliver assured them. "Was there some kind of emergency?"

Laurel hoped not. The last one at Barry and Iris' first attempt at a wedding had been uncomfortable to say the least, without even getting into the loss of Dr. Stein.

"No, no. Everything's fine. Actually, Iris and I were talking and we sort of wanted to run an idea by you. For the holidays, kind of the pick up people's spirits, you know?"

Laurel shared a curious look with Thea before her friend asked, "Sure, what's the idea?"

"A Secret Superhero. Like a non-denominational Secret Santa," Iris explained. "We pick names, get each other gifts. It's a fun way to get to know everyone a little bit better."

Laurel didn't see anything wrong with it. Thea was smiling and John was also nodding along.

"It sounds fun," Curtis, their tech support ever since Felicity had departed the team over a year and a half ago.

"I was thinking just a little get-together at the old farmhouse," Barry said to Oliver. "Nothing big, we don't have to make a big deal out of it—"

"Oh, make as big a deal as you want. Ollie loves Christmas," Laurel said.

"Wait, really?" Barry and Iris looked both stunned and delighted by this information. "I never would have guessed!"

"I- it's a nice time for friends and family," Oliver said, his shoulders hunched at the attention he was receiving. Laurel bit her lip. She hadn't meant to embarrass him. "How do you want to do this, Barry?"

"We figured we'd have you all pick first, then take the remaining names back with us for the team at STAR Labs." Iris took out a little baggie of paper slips and removed her Santa hat with her other. She dumped the paper into the hat and shook it around, then stepped forward.

"Who would like to go first?"

Thea naturally did, and the hat was passed around in a semicircle from there. Laurel withdrew her own slip and felt her heart give a funny jump when she read the name.

_Oliver._

God, she couldn't even remember the last time she'd gotten him a gift… actually she could, and the memory of standing there on the dock with love bubbling up in her and his kiss on her lips, it nearly stole her breath.

"Okay, Bear, your turn," Iris said, her voice drawing Laurel out off the reverie. She gave a little shake of the head.

Barry drew his name and Iris drew hers. The couple exchanged a smile before each tucked their slips of paper away.

"Okay, so we'll be in touch. We're thinking maybe about two weeks from now?"

Oliver looked up from his paper and nodded. "That's fine."

"Okay, great. We'll see you then!" With that, the West-Allens left the base as quickly as they came.

"Okay! Maybe an early night so people can get started shopping?" Curtis asked after a brief silence.

"We've got two weeks, Curtis," Oliver reminded him.

"Right. Yeah, of course."

Laurel almost wished they had taken an early night, because her mind just wasn't in it the rest of that time. She knew that wasn't good, but she couldn't help worrying about the gift exchange.

Oliver wasn't a material kind of guy, at least not since the island. He appreciated gifts that had utility or that had some sort of sentimental value. But what kind of sentiment could she express that didn't give everything away?

She'd nearly confessed her still-present feelings so many times. The closer they seemed to get the harder it was to keep silent. Reminding herself that all it would do was drag up long-buried history Oliver had decisively buried. No matter what kind of signals she thought she might have been picking up. It was all in her head, or better yet, her heart.

Still she wanted to give him something that had meaning nonetheless. It was what he deserved after all they had been through together.

But what to get for the man who'd had and lost everything? And who meant everything to her?

Oliver was well-practiced at hiding his emotions, which allowed him to keep anyone from guessing whose name he might have drawn. On the inside, however? He was a mess.

_Laurel,_ the paper read. Of course.

He still hadn't told her. Still hadn't said anything in over a year, had sworn Thea, John, Sara and Ray all to secrecy over the matter. The dream.

His dream. His dream of the life they could have had before the _Gambit,_ before all this, if he hadn't pushed her away like a fool.

Laurel remained in his life as a friend. She was far too kind to him to even allow that. And now he had been handed the chance, by literal chance, to show just some of the appreciation he felt for her continued presence every day.

If he were truly brave enough, bold enough, he might even show her how he felt. But could he?

It was now or never. If he let this opportunity pass him by… but maybe he should. What would be the point after all these years?

He watched her over the next week. Her gentle smiles, soft touch and compassion never wavered. Neither did her fierce sense of herself and of what was right. Oliver tried to imagine it — that version of Laurel, not just the one in his head, still in love with him. Was it something that could be reality or truly just a dream?

There was one thing that had been in the dream. Something he'd given her. Something he wished he really had given her in their actual lives. So Oliver set to work, all the while knowing he might be setting himself on a collision course with disaster.

The night of the party arrived and their team came into Central on a high-speed train, meeting Barry and others out at the farmhouse. Oliver paced the ground floor as everyone stood around chatting in small groups. He noticed Barry watching him with concern while Iris perched on his lap, but Oliver waved him off. Better that Barry not keep troubling himself with Oliver's romantic failures; he'd gotten his happy ending.

"Hey, Ollie, I think we're gonna start," his sister called to him when he'd been out on the porch for several minutes alone.

"Okay." He touched the small box in his pocket and squared his shoulders before marching inside.

Laurel sat on the arm of the couch, taking up very little space so as to accommodate the others, he noticed. Her present, a large rectangle — in another life, he might have teased her about bringing a book — rested on her lap. She kept smoothing the wrapping paper down nervously, unconsciously. Oliver wondered who it was for.

"Okay, everyone," Iris said, walking into the middle of the room. "We're gonna try to do this in a chain. You get your present, you give your person their present and so on. As the hostess of the festivities, I'll start us off." She took a couple steps forward to John who stood up against a wall. "John, this is for you."

His friend smiled in thanks and unwrapped his gift. It was a toolkit for maintenance and cleaning of guns.

"Oh, this had to be too much."

"Nope," Iris informed him with a wide smile. "Dad knows how to get the best deals. I figured you could always use more even if you have your own supply."

"Well, thank you." John se this present aside and then picked up the wrapped gift he'd brought. He turned, and for a moment when his eyes met Oliver's, Oliver thought — "This is for you, Caitlin."

Oliver breathed a sigh of relief. He wasn't going yet. He knew he would have to, eventually. But maybe if he just steeled his nerves, he'd be ready.

His in attention caused him to miss a couple exchanges, and so he refocused, wanting to be prepared. Cisco had Thea, Thea had Barry and Barry had Curtis. A new custom-made quiver, a Flash-themed Christmas sweater and some new kind of gadget were all exchanged. On and on things went, the list of people and gifts dwindling. Oliver waited for someone to call his name, to turn to him. It didn't happen.

"I had Iris," Wally West said, standing up to hand his sister the package in his hands. She unwrapped a set of fountain pens that wouldn't have been out of place on Oliver's mother's desk and reached out to give her brother a tight hug.

Wally grinned for a moment before looking around. "So what happens now?"

"Who didn't go?" Asked Cisco.

"Uh, I didn't," said Laurel, and it suddenly clicked.

"Neither did I."

The room seemed to hush as they met eyes across the room. Laurel's displayed surprise, then happiness and then strangest of all nerves.

"I guess we had each other."

"I guess so," said Oliver, his voice needlessly quiet. He cleared his throat. "So, uh—"

"Right." Laurel stood, and he met her halfway. Oliver nearly dropped the box as he took it from his pocket, but managed to pass it to Laurel without incident. The package she handed him felt like book, but somehow heavier.

"Ooh, open them at the same time!" Caitlin suggested.

Laurel inclined her head as she looked at him, as if asking how he felt about that idea. Oliver nodded, and she turned her attention to peeling back the wrapping paper.

He watched her instead. He couldn't help himself.

"Looks like jewelry?" He thought he heard Curtis mutter to someone else as the velvet box was revealed.

Laurel opened the jewelry box, her eyes going wide. "Oh."

"What is it?" This time it was Iris who asked.

"A bird necklace," Laurel said, turning it around to show the room. It got a couple of appreciative "oohs" from Iris and Caitlin while some of the guys looked at him with raised eyebrows.

"It's a canary," Oliver told her. "Cause, you know." He somehow lost any semblance of a train of thought as she looked up at him with a brilliant smile.

Behind him, there was a gasp as Thea caught sight of the necklace. She came up to his side. "How did you find it?"

So she recognized it. There had always been the chance. The knowing look John was wearing across the room said she wasn't the only one. Oliver ducked his head. "I, uh, made it."

"From memory?"

"Wait, sorry, what are we talking about?" Laurel asked.

Beside him, Thea wore a panicked look. "I, um, I meant — maybe you should open your present, Ollie."

"Yeah," he agreed quickly, ripping back the wrapping paper with far less care than Laurel had displayed. He realized right away why it had held the shape of a book while feeling heavier. It was a leather-bound photo album.

"I figured in all the moves you've had to make, you probably haven't been able to hold onto many pictures," Laurel explained. "So I looked through what I had and I asked around."

Oliver opened the cover and saw his own old baby photo under a plastic covering. Thea's baby photo was beside it, and two underneath of his mother holding first him as an infant and then the other of his mother holding Thea with him standing by her shoulder. The edge of that one looked slightly singed.

"The fire at the Manor," Laurel said, seeming to read his confused look. He nodded. Allowing himself one last look at the long-forgotten images, he shut the album.

"Thank you, Laurel."

"And thank you for this," she said, taking the necklace out of the box and holding it up in the light. She made to put it on, seeming to have some trouble finding the clasp without being able to see it.

"Here." He moved behind her, setting his new album on a table for a moment in order to move Laurel's hair aside to fasten the clasp of the necklace. As his fingers brushed her neck, he thought he saw her shoulders jump and heard a sharp intake of breath. It was agony to force himself to step back, to take his hands away from her. He took the photo album back up between both hands instead. Laurel looked over her shoulder at him, her eyes wide and lips slightly parted.

"Wait, we're not passing around Oliver's baby photos?" Cisco asked, earning a round of laughs from the room and breaking the moment of tension between them.

"Nope," he managed to reply, glancing back once at Laurel before making his retreat. Had he imagined her cheeks turning red or had it simply been a trick of the light?

As the party picked back up he found refuge on the porch swing outside. He hadn't said what he wanted to, even when Thea had unintentionally given him the opening. Why was he such a coward?

Alone, Oliver opened the album to random pages. His family at the beach house in Coast City. Him and his father, working on an old boat engine. His first day of school, and then a second photo from the first day of the next year. Him and Tommy standing in front of the car in their uniforms with tiny backpacks on their shoulders. There was his senior photo, but not his senior prom. A Christmas photo with his family, too, even when he knew he'd also taken a photo with Laurel that year as their first Christmas together as a couple.

Had those photos just been lost in the fire? But then when another photo surfaced of him and Tommy on the slopes at Aspen from the trip he _knew_ Laurel had come with them on just as he knew what she'd spent her nights there doing with him, he thought he was starting to sense a pattern.

Then he flipped a page and was faced with Thea holding a bow and arrow. He squinted at it, because that couldn't be right. Thea's hair was long the way she'd worn it as a teenager and she looked decidedly that age as well.

"Some of those are from your time away."

Oliver looked up. Laurel had wrapped herself up in a blanket and stood watching him on the porch swing. Wordlessly, he scooted over and she joined him.

She turned the page and pointed to a photo he had never seen before of his mother in a cream-colored dress looking radiantly happy. "Like, um, this was your mother on her and Walter's wedding day. He was able to find me it in his things."

She flipped another page and his old friend was smiling up at him with an arm around a young woman probably none of them knew the name of.

"That was Tommy's twenty-fifth birthday," Laurel told him.

"Looks like a typical Tommy birthday."

They both smiled, fond and sad. They'd sat like this going through old photos once before, and he'd kissed her. He hadn't known then it would be the last time.

Laurel dropped her gaze. "Yeah. There's, um, one more I wanted to show you myself because, it's a bit of a story. Samantha gave me a photo to pass along to my dad in case we'd needed to put out a missing poster."

Oliver felt a lump rise in his throat as Laurel went past several pages with glimpses of John, Roy and even Felicity to reveal a photo of William dressed in his baseball uniform. He hadn't seen his son since that terrible time on the island. Thank God Laurel and Thea had pulled Samantha back to avoid her getting hurt or something worse, but she had been even more adamant after that that his world and William's world were never to collide. And he hadn't blamed her.

Having this now, though, it brought the love and longing he felt for his son back to the surface. Oliver put a hand to his mouth, his shoulders trembling slightly.

"Ollie, I'm sorry." Laurel's hand rested on his arm. "I didn't know if it would be too much, I just—"

"It's not. I don't — I didn't have anything of him. I love it. I do." He turned and hugged her. In her arms, he finally found the strength to add, "It's just, there's something missing."

Laurel paused, her hand stilling where it had begun rubbing his back. "What's that?"

"You."

She pulled back and looked at him. "Well, um, most of the photos I have with us are from when we…"

"I know."

Laurel searched his face, then touched the canary pendant hanging from her neck. "Ollie, what was Thea talking about earlier?"

He licked his lips and said, "You know when a few of us were captured in that Dominator ship? While we were there, they put us into some kind of illusion. It all looked and felt so real, but it wasn't. It was… I guess in a way it was all our greatest temptations come to life."

He looked down at the photo album and flipped back a few pages to a photo of his family. "Mom and dad were alive, Ray was happily engaged, the island had never happened. And you were there, too."

"Well, what was special about that?"

Oliver hesitated a single moment, then looked up and met her eyes. "We were getting married."

Laurel clutched the pendant, her eyes wide with shock. Oliver nodded at it.

"That necklace was an engagement present I'd given you. I'm not trying to say it means that here. I know that — one of the hardest parts about leaving that world was coming back and seeing the real you and knowing that could never be us."

Laurel flinched back. "It can't?"

Oliver froze, then slowly set the album aside on the bench. He angled himself more towards her. "I didn't think you could remember being in love with me."

Laurel's lips pressed tight together, clearly knowing exactly what he was talking about. Then she said in a voice, carefully light in that way where she was trying to hold back tears, "I thought you were done running after me."

He closed his eyes. Of all the things he had ever said in anger, perhaps that conversation was one he wished he could take back the most.

"It wasn't true."

"It wasn't true," she echoed, and he knew she was referring to her own previous declaration of no longer having feelings. Falsehoods they had told each other and perhaps told to themselves to try and keep apart.

He looked at her again. Laurel's eyes were shining bright in the porch light and her lips were twisted in a funny sort of way as if to hold everything inside. Oliver reached out, but faltered before he made it there.

"In the dream, I told you I didn't deserve you. I still don't."

Her fingers brushed his cheek, guiding him back to face her. She gave a slow shake of the head. "It's never been about that, Ollie."

Then she leaned in, her lips soft against his own. Their breath mingled and turned to puffs of steam in the winter night air. The swing rocked as he pulled her closer, deepening the kiss.

She was warm, almost hot to the touch under the blanket, and Oliver couldn't help grinning when she shivered at the touch of his cold hands. But Laurel determinedly pressed herself to him, one leg sliding over his knee. He seized her around the waist, lifting her onto his lap—

"Hey, we're taking a picture! Oh," Barry added in the doorway as they both turned their faces to look at him. "Uh, my bad."

"That's okay, Barry," Laurel spoke for them, which was probably good since Oliver was inclined towards growling in annoyance at the moment. "We'll be inside in a minute."

"Yeah, sure. Take your time." The speedster didn't tap into his powers to leave, but he suspected it was a near thing.

Oliver sighed and prepared to get up, only for Laurel to turn back around in his lap and kiss him again soundly. "What? He said take our time."

The photo of their joint teams was a crowded affair, but it was easiest to pick out him and Laurel. His jacket collar was rumpled, her hair a little mussed, and both of them had their arms around each other with wide smiles while the light glinted off her canary necklace.

It was the first of many new additions to his album.


End file.
